


of aubades and things that try to bloom in the dark

by meikuree (rillarev)



Series: maybe it's my hard head that keeps me dreaming [3]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Ficlet Collection, Introspection, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-08
Updated: 2020-06-13
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:41:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23544064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rillarev/pseuds/meikuree
Summary: A collection of my Pieck-centric drabbles/ficlets from Tumblr. Will be centred around femslash (F/F) pairings.Ratings vary from T to M; see chapter notes for detailed information.Latest chapter: Chapter 5Pieck helps Annie find her way back to her roots, or: a study of their relationship. T rating. 1200 words.
Relationships: Annie Leonhart/Pieck, Mikasa Ackerman/Pieck, Pieck/Yelena (Shingeki no Kyojin)
Series: maybe it's my hard head that keeps me dreaming [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1652560
Comments: 2
Kudos: 46





	1. Pieck/Yelena: asking about you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pieck/Yelena: intimacies that are difficult to broach. Rating: M
> 
> inspired by this [eloise klein healy](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52854/asking-about-you) poem and originally posted on tumblr, [here](https://meikuree.tumblr.com/post/614249328533487616/the-intensity-with-which-yelena-looks-at-her-is)

> _Instead of having sex all the time I like to hold you and not get into some involved discussion of what life means. I want you to tell me something I don’t know about you. Something about the day before that photograph in which you’re standing on your head. I want to know about softball and the team picture. Why are you so little next to the others? Were you younger? Were you small as a girl? What I want most is to have been a girl with you and played on the opposite team so I could have liked you and competed against you at the same time._

_—_ “Asking About You”, Eloise Klein Healy

  
The intensity with which Yelena looks at her is something that still makes the breath catch in Pieck’s throat, every time. They come together like a car crash, always, like pent-up entropy exploding in a cascading flash. Yelena’s repressed ferocity bleeds through every press of her lips to Pieck’s body, to whatever site she can find to mark the woman before her: collarbones, her neck, the expanse of flesh below her chest. She kisses Pieck mercilessly, unrelentingly, all hard edge as she presses her up against the walls of bunkers and clandestine safehouses. And Pieck is no pushover; she responds in kind, giving as good as she gets and then some more, knows that there is only one thing to do in contending with someone who speaks so singularly in one language. Her normally placid nature gives way to barely contained rage that she doles out in generous doses through rough bites and kisses hard enough to make even Yelena shudder defenceless. They are a picture of skidding passions and inevitable collisions.

In the moments after their trysts, nonetheless, Pieck often finds herself softening. Cards her fingers through her short hair, velvet fingers caressing Yelena into maudlin contemplation. Asks her: _did you have any hobbies as a child?_ And Yelena, someone always ready with cutting repartees on hand, goes quiet instead. Speaks up after a while, tells Pieck: _something silly like running and hiking._

 _Is that so,_ Pieck responds, smiling brightly. _I would have liked to join you, so we could have been two girls running away together from the world._ Yelena’s eyes turn away then, and guilt flashes past within them. The night ends tepidly, a humid wave of tenderness catching in both their throats that neither know fully how to address. But actions have always rung louder than words, and so Pieck cleaves Yelena closer to her as she draws her arms around her. Whispers sweet nothings into her ear. Feels her body coming alive with _something_ that makes her sing more fervently than life itself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> come yell at me about these girls on my [tumblr](https://meikuree.tumblr.com/)


	2. Pieck/Yelena: dichotomy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rating: T. 
> 
> Pieck/Yelena, a study of what Yelena thinks about Pieck.

If she had to describe Pieck, Yelena thinks, she'd call her a violently gentle person.

On first impression Pieck is an easygoing and laidback person, but knowing her the way she does now, Yelena recognises that there is nothing casual about her kindness. Or the way she ushers a golden tapestry of hearth-warm feelings into every room she walks. She is gentle to a sharpened point, a blackened spear of benevolence, in a way that unforgivingly pierces Yelena's conscience and makes her shrivel in guilt. In a way that suggests that the converse possibility exists: that she reserves the most wrathful of judgement for those who cross her moral limits.

Pieck does it to prove some unseen creed, some higher point in her philosophical horizon that exerts its presence but lies out of reach of Yelena's comprehension. This unnerves her. Yelena is ruthless, but not emotionally insipid-- she may find most people too trivial to be worth her time at all, but she can get to the heart of what makes their blood run cold or their heart freeze in moments.

Pieck is like shifting quicksand in her fingers: she constantly eludes Yelena's grasp, and trying to strip her personality down to a few underlying principles brings as much successful as attempting to carry water in one's hands. She is too self-assured, and that is what makes her dangerous: she is happy to cloister away certain parts of herself that will eternally remain out of reach, no matter how much Yelena delves herself into her life. There is no thread of desperation in her that can be pulled to make all her heart-entrails tumble out in mortifying exposure. She will always be an enigma in some ways.

One afternoon, as they share coffee on one of their rare days together, Yelena asks her about it: _why do you give so much generosity to people?_

Pieck pauses, as she simmers in blithe contemplation. She looks as if she is about to quibble with Yelena's characterisation of her, but soon answers. _When I was a child, my father told me to be kind to monsters._ She doesn’t elaborate further, and Yelena knows despite the soft focus in her eyes that it isn’t a good idea to probe right now.

After a few awkward beats smoothed over by inundating sips of their coffee, Pieck shoots back a mundane question to Yelena: _what are you aiming for in life?_

The question is dressed in the clothes of flippant inquiry, but Yelena feels that inscrutable eye of judgement descend upon her. Yelena answers truthfully, because not doing so would be to risk the fearsome. _Everything,_ Yelena says. _Revolution. Rising up in the military, and then bringing it down along with Marley. I want the promises of blood on my tongue and an august name in history. Of compensation from the world for how it has hurt me._

This would normally be the point at which typical people became disturbed and excused themself with a cough. Pieck simply becomes more thoughtful as her eyes lock sight with Yelena's, and comments in a wry but not altogether unsympathetic voice: _you have ambitions, Yelena._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> come yell at me about these girls on my [tumblr](meikuree.tumblr.com/)


	3. Pieck/Annie: tell me about your despair, and i will tell you mine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pieck/Annie, things that weigh on your mind. T rating.
> 
> Title from "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver.

They’re laying side by side, faces turned towards each other, with half-worn bedsheets bunched up around their bodies, the night an overhanging veil of gloom. They’ve been here before, many times, always the ritual of Annie slipping into Pieck’s bed at night when she can’t sleep. She says as much every time she walks in when the moon has dwindled to a fleeing silver, gives the same explanation: _it’s too hard to sleep in my room._ The real reason, which Pieck begins discerning soon after the first ten times it happens, is: _I’m frightened, and I can’t stand to be alone with my thoughts._ She sees it in the trembling palms of her ambivalent hands, the way her fingers dig into the side of her long sleeves, the penitential gloom Annie always falls into. Each time, Pieck simply nods and lays there in the dark, peering at her through diaphanous eyelashes, and lets her warmth and breathing lull her into a better escape. She never probes, simply gives her a safe space away from prying questions.

Tonight Annie looks different. She usually feels a hundred times older, her world-weariness cavitating itself into her shoulders. But now she peers at Pieck with so much blue in her eyes, such a far cry from her usual dreamless stare, that she looks for a moment like the world’s most young and vulnerable girl. As Pieck brushes a stray strand of hair behind Annie’s ears, she feels a question working its way into the shape of Annie’s voice.

 _Do you think people like us can ever be forgiven?_ Annie asks, her voice coming out choked and ensnared in the stale midnight air.

Pieck’s face is calm, but she feels a vise settling itself into her throat as she replies. She’s thought too often about the same thing. She lets a hard truth fall from her lips. _It’s alright if we can’t, Annie. Nobody leaves this world with their hands clean. Everyone gets bloodied for something._

And Annie, understanding that this is the only lifeline available to monsters like her— a necessary one if she wants to avoid tormenting herself to madness— curls her fingers around Pieck’s soft hands.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> come yell at me about these girls on my [tumblr](meikuree.tumblr.com/)


	4. Pieck/Mikasa: exposure

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pieck/Mikasa, things said when no one else was around. 
> 
> Eren/Mikasa is very vaguely hinted at.
> 
> Rating: T

She always came onto her as smoothly and discreetly as a cat, insinuating herself so subtly into the mental territory Mikasa normally allowed only people who’d known her for years entry to, that by the time Mikasa realized Pieck was there exploding her secrets open she had already left the line of being an intruder so far behind that it felt trite to point out her transgression.

“You’re greater than you know, you know,” she whispered sweetly into Mikasa’s ear on this occasion, charmeuse-soft and lilting like a beckoning breeze. “Everyone talks about you. You’re incomparable. The most beautiful person they’ve all ever seen.”

“What makes you say that,” she asked Pieck lamely, her face neutral but her heart restless. What she feared was not the fact that Pieck thought these things of her, but what she must have found out this time to suddenly be giving voice to these compliments.

At this Pieck simply pressed a kiss into the skin of her arm with a dangerous smile, as if the answer was obvious enough that it should have occurred to Mikasa in the crystal-clearness of her knifelike instincts five seconds ago. Mikasa, not for the first time, felt vulnerable in the blinding light of her all-knowing stare.

“You’re the fulcrum of your own life, Mikasa. Whoever he is, you don’t need him,” Pieck responded with a knowing purr, and sealed her words with a lingering kiss to Mikasa’s lips.

At the loosening of these revealing words into the air, Mikasa felt the many thousand dull aches imprinted into her shoulders and her heart spring forth again—but their intensity soon lost to the bleeding heat of Pieck’s body pressed to hers, and they melded into each other like sloppy forgotten ink.

In the morning, Pieck would be like an ephemeral feather upon her pillow, gone with a single trick of the light. But for now, Mikasa endured the spinning openness of this moment with infinity.


	5. Pieck/Annie: homecoming

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pieck helps Annie find her way back to her roots. T rating.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this was initially supposed to be just a 300 words thing to unstick myself from some writer's block, and it eventually snowballed into this. someone [pointed out on twitter](https://mobile.twitter.com/alinajames/status/1271387976120107010) that pieck is implied in the manga to be slightly older than all the other warriors except zeke, and i haven’t been able to stop thinking about it-- so Pieck is intended to be written as someone who’s a few years older than Annie here 
> 
> i also wrote this while listening to seventeen by sharon van etten on repeat, so the tone in this reflects that somewhat, hah. enjoy

I walk through the market,  
kissing colors in a murmur  
of self-induced petition.

From line to line,  
from point to point,  
is an architect's end of cities.

But I lie down  
to a different turbulence  
and a plan of transformation.  
\-- "Homecoming", Jay Wright

Home has always been an ambivalent concept for Annie, between the austere lodgings of her father’s training regimes and a violent country interested in fostering home only insofar as it pushes children to enlist in military operations to redeem families out of misguided purpose. All Annie knows of home is what other people have invested in it, negated of it for instrumental intentions. It is a propaganda poster, a nationalist narrative, an adoptive father who expresses affection by shouting at her-- something she knows of but hasn't touched. It could weigh down her life if she only let it. But as it stands, she finds the concept as ephemeral and insubstantial as woolly cobweb, and she is now a thoroughly secular creature after everything she has seen. She has never believed in something just because that is the easier option, and she chooses to abandon _home_ within the debris of her daydreams.

* * *

Annie used to look often at her callused and scuffle-bitten hands, examining the keloids and pale scars running over her palm, wondering what a palmistrist would decipher out of them; wondering how free she truly was in all this. The precarity of being tethered to Marley, by nothing more than one relation she still has mixed feelings about, is laughable to her. Hypothetically, she ought to find it the easiest to flee. She thinks of monstrous feet carrying her over ashes and sea to a far-flung corner of the atlas. She thinks of how she’ll submerge herself into the sea, becoming wandering fiction, and never be reduced to a body and what it can do for others again. 

_What fools they are to hinge their dirty work upon my shoulders,_ Annie muses. _I am only human, and a walking gamble. I could abscond one day with everything powerful inside me._

But she feels less nowadays like an unanchored bird, and more like an island far out in the ocean, with nothing to hold her down against the buffeting forces of bigger powers.

Something compels her to stay. Not duty to Marley or the brainwashing— she’s seen through those long ago— but something like the loneliness of a recessed heart, or grudging obligation. She hasn’t fully discerned which, but it is likely a mix of both. They are not such different emotions as they seem, and their edges bleed together into an emotional muddle during moments of personal reckoning. She feels something of wayward connection to Bertholdt and Reiner. _Family_ floats upon her tongue when she looks at them in the greys and browns of their vulnerable rooms, an apparition of distance between them. It dissolves quickly with a wistful aftertaste when she thinks upon the word.

* * *

Pieck and Zeke eventually arrive on the island three years in. Pieck meets her with smiling eyes and leaping warmth, a perspective that sees into and beyond Annie at the same time. And despite herself and all that she is becoming, Annie can’t help but reach out for small mercies within another person.

She’s meant to have long given up. And yet, sometimes, Annie still hopes for some give to this whole mess they’re in. She's already mastered the skill of making the improbable happen-- placing in the top ten, infiltrating corrupt institutions-- and yet she is not fool enough to convince herself that she hasn’t also been motivated by the same wish to return _somewhere_ that the others have. The distance between what the world could be and what it is right now increasingly chills her to worried nervousness. She ought to be allowed to visit her father one final time, before everything has to go to hell. There's more that she wants to say than what she wagered. It all stews inside her like a bad roiling porridge. 

Pieck reassures and sympathises with her on more than one occasion, whenever they meet in the outpost at the fringes of the island. _“I don't know if this will ever end, but we’ll have each other all the while.”_

 _“Holding on is all we can do, as trivial and useless as it seems,”_ is another piece of circumspect advice she offers on a different occasion. Post-mission, she draws on the wavering dregs of her energy to brew warm cups of tea for both her and Annie in their closed quarters, still steady in her actions and reliability despite fatigue.

(The warmth Annie feels, more from the gesture than the tea, makes the sparse room more liveable in a way that she has not had enough direct experience with to articulate.) 

Her brand of realistic pessimism is more comforting than any of the conditional praise that Magath or Zeke constantly offer. Pieck manages to extend generosity without condescension unlike so many others, and empathy from someone stuck deep in similar trenches feels different. Annie’s made a habit of holding Pieck’s hands in her troubled ones while lying in bed, whenever she steals away short spurts of time where she doesn't have to pretend at normalcy in the military police. 

She hadn't realised how touch-starved she’s been lately-- from birth, even, if she’s to be honest-- and it surprises herself when she reaches her arms out to hold Pieck tightly and cry silently into her shoulders. Pieck simply rubs steadily at her back with tears dotting her eyes too, understanding without the need for words. And she meets Annie where she is, with as best a safe space as she can offer.

* * *

Annie wonders if this is perhaps what she’s been rending her life to pieces for, after all, or rather, what’s making it all look a little more worthwhile— the chance to lie close to Pieck’s suffusing warmth in bed with her arms wrapped around Pieck’s waist, eyes closed and head resting upon her shoulders. The times they can meet have been short-lived and even shorter-frequencied, and every time Pieck is exhausted by recon missions. So they make the most out of it, electing to rest together in a small bunkbed together to recover from their respective tribulations. They’re nearly the same height, and it makes it easy for Annie to hold her, or vice versa. Annie comes to relish these quiet moments when she is in close proximity to Pieck’s reassuring presence, feeling the sensation of Pieck’s warmth and her gentle hair while they press close to each other. Every time Pieck accidentally rolls away in sleep, Annie reaches out with her hands to find Pieck’s, and no matter how sleepy or drowsy she is, Pieck always responds with a comforting squeeze. Annie’s never met anyone so humbly alive, and she makes a routine out of pressing warm lips to Pieck’s shoulders in awe-struck gratitude. 

There are many things about Pieck that Annie marvels at, from the fact that her father apparently acted little like what she knew her and Reiner’s father to be, to the way she manages to read deeper stratas of understanding into any situation. But chief of all is the way she makes others feel seen and taken seriously: like they are more than their circumstances and limitations, like there are depths to themselves she appreciates; as if unabiding gentleness is her first language, and not the Marleyan government’s brand of cruelty and ruthlessness that waits to be imprinted upon every hapless child at birth. 

Here, she thinks, she understands; understands a little more of what it means to attach herself to something, not by clinging onto imperfect relationships, but by parsing out the poison in obligation from what will nourish her and give her peace. She’s come to know what the world is about— not a theatre of grand battles and trifles, not a fruitless venture of looking for a singular magical anchor like _home_ to justify all this, but trusting the process as it develops, and treasuring the little pieces of what _home_ can be: someone’s words, someone’s arms, someone’s kindness.

In Pieck’s gaze she does her best to let her old understandings fall apart, then build herself up again.


End file.
